


romance languages

by groove_bunker



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 02:34:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groove_bunker/pseuds/groove_bunker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>language and words are all that matter to Alex. <br/>until they're not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	romance languages

_english_  
Her first words are predictable.   
Mama  
Papa  
No  
Of course, she’s been good at saying no since she knew what it meant. Words come easy to her; she starts talking earlier than any of her mother’s friends children. As she grows up and tries her first crossword puzzle, she finds that she loves the power in words and collects them greedily, reading dictionaries and thesauruses under the covers at night. Her brother thinks she’s weird.  
She doesn’t care.

  
  
 _español_  
The first time she hears Spanish it enchants her. 

_the lady behind the counter tells her to ‘have a good day, mi querido’_

It’s so much softer than English, more musical. She can’t work out where the words come from, they’re so alien and detached from anything she knows. She starts Spanish classes the next semester and no one’s surprised when she comes top of the class in every test. The words just seem to feel comfortable in her mouth, seem to fit and flow in a way that they don’t to anyone else.   
By the time she’s 15, she’s bilingual.   
  
 _guānhuà_  
Her best friend in high school speaks Mandarin at home and English at school and she can’t help but be impressed. He teaches her the basics but she doesn’t like it as much as Spanish or English or French, which had seemed like the next logical step. She finds it harder, finds that the words feel spiky in her mouth. They fall like rocks from her lips, ugly and disjointed. After a while, she decides it’s not her path in life to ever be fluent in Chinese.   
The few phrases she does know win her friends at the takeout place three blocks down from the hospital when her mother gets sick. She’ll always be thankful for that.  
  
 _asl_  
When her grandmother’s hearing begins to go, she does what anyone else would do. A language without speech is crazy to her, but she tries her hardest, teaching her grandmother alongside. She discovers she likes teaching as much as she likes learning, even when her grandma is being a difficult student.  
When her grandmother dies a few years later, she thinks she forgets how to talk. It’s the scariest thing in the world.  
  
 _lingua latina_  
Her first semester at college is where everything starts to make sense. Latin is what holds it all together. She resurrects it, wants to speak it everywhere, to everyone. They should understand, she thinks, where their words come from because the history is what gives them a context, what gives them a meaning.   
A lot of people at Berkeley think she’s pretentious. She tries not to care.  
  
 _deutsch_  
Two weeks of German classes teaches her all she needs to know.  
She transfers to Portuguese 101 as soon as she possibly can.   
  
 _français_  
Double major in Linguistics and French. It had definitely sounded less insane when she picked it last year. It had almost been Spanish but she likes a challenge and her French could do with improving. Now she’s a sophomore, she almost regrets it, normally when her teacher snipes at her accent or she’s up at 1am with nothing but a dictionary for company.  
Almost, though, because French might be her favourite yet. She’s beginning to collect languages like she collected words as a child; she needs new ones, because the old ones can get stale after a while.  
She hates running out of things to say and new ways to say them.  
  
 _português_  
The summer between sophmore and freshman year, she goes to Brazil to teach English. As August begins to turn into September, she finds she doesn’t want to leave. Brazil is the most incredible place she’s ever been and the language challenges her in a way she hasn’t experienced since her ill fated attempt at Mandarin.   
She meets someone, in a bar, and they laugh about her broken Portuguese. The other woman, Maria, only has some English but their words fit together, like two different puzzles making a picture, one that’s nothing like what you expected. Later, in Maria’s small apartment, there are fewer words but they fit together all the same.   
Unexpected, but nice.  
  
 _secrets_  
The FBI is full of them.   
She learns the codes, the passwords, the little in-jokes pretty quickly because when doesn’t she?   
She learns the secret language but she never feels fluent, never feels like she belongs. Maybe it is slight relief she feels when she realises her reputation has just dive-bombed off a building. Now she has to learn again, start from the beginning.  
She’s good at that.   
  
 _grief_  
She knows in some cultures, the language of grief is screeches, shrill screams, the beating of chests, the tearing of clothes. Grief is much more visceral than anything else she knows how to speak, so when her mother dies, she falls silent again.   
The only sound her neighbours hear for days is pen on newspaper as she completes crossword after crossword.  
  
 _james_  
Being married is a lot like learning a language. There are certain rules, but always exceptions, certain words that are better than others. Their marriage isn’t conventional but it works and everyday, they learn something new. She loves it, loves the challenge. She doesn’t like the way it feels though, when she’s speaking the same language as her husband but he doesn’t seem to understand it.   
Sometimes she remembers the way her words fitted with Maria’s that night and wonders if that would be too much to ask from him.   
  
 _jennifer_  
She’s never known people who use less words. Her team is so in tune with one another that words have become irrelevant in conversation.   
She hates it.   
Jennifer is the only one who realises, who gets that of course the linguist needs the words, needs to speak instead of think, needs to be told instead of realise. Their words don’t fit, they don’t even come close sometimes, but even when they disagree, she knows that Jennifer understands her more than her husband does.   
  
 _romance_  
She speaks Latin and three Romance languages fluently.   
It turns out that knowing how to romance someone is something quite different. There are no rules, no structure.  Romance is about feelings, about your heart and not your head. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be fluent, but for the first time, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care because she’s learning something which might turn out to be more important than words altogether.


End file.
